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Photos: Inside UTS' underground robot library

Robot cranes run the 13,000m³ facility.

The University of Technology Sydney recently cut the ribbon on its new robot-controlled library retrieval system, located underground at its central Sydney campus. The 13,000m³ automated storage and retrieval facility is housed beneath the under-construction Alumni Green outdoor tree-lined space, and will eventually be joined by the university's library, which is set to move into the adjacent building left vacant by the IT and engineering department's move to new digs down the road.

The LRS was built to house 325,000 library books - or 80 percent of the entire collection - that weren’t being borrowed regularly to free up space in the library.
The library still has around 250,000 more recent books, bought over the last ten years, sitting physically on its shelves. The LRS has a total capacity of around one million items.

Terminals at the LRS. UTS is the second Australian university to implement this technology, behind Macquarie University.

Students use the university's Millenium library management system to browse and place an order for books. The students don't actually collect the book from the LRS - that is done by library staff who bring the books to specific collection points in the library.

The books are housed in 12,000 galvanised steel bins and are managed by a fleet of Dematic robotic cranes. There is one crane for each of the six aisles.

The cranes are controlled by software provided by logistics automation company Dematic - called the EMS Control Centre - which has been specially tweaked to communicate with a web service built by UTS to display book covers and notify students of request status.
The Dematic software also communicates with the university’s Millenium integrated library system, provided by software vendor Innovative.

The robot crane receives the information, collects the requested books from the archive, and transports them five stories to the receiving area for the librarian to collect. The system uses the existing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology the university deployed in the library collection in 2012 to load and identify the books. Books are delivered to the receiving area within 15 minutes.

The receiving area of the LRS. The system notifies the student when the book is in transit and when it is ready for collection.

Librarians continue to use the old-fashioned trolley to deliver the requested books to students.

The University of Technology Sydney recently cut the ribbon on its new robot-controlled library retrieval system, located underground at its central Sydney campus. The 13,000m³ automated storage and retrieval facility is housed beneath the under-construction Alumni Green outdoor tree-lined space, and will eventually be joined by the university's library, which is set to move into the adjacent building left vacant by the IT and engineering department's move to new digs down the road.

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